Super-Typhoon Megi was packing winds that may have reached 200 miles per hour before it struck the Philippines Monday morning, not only the strongest hurricane of the busy 2010 season, but one of the strongest tropical cyclones on record.
Words to describe it get jumbled sometimes and easily misunderstood, mainly because people in different parts of the world have different names for the same type of storms. What North Americans and Europeans call hurricanes, Asians and most folks in the Southern Hemisphere call typhoons. More often than not, weather scientists call them tropical cyclones, which better describes where they come from and what they look like.
Whatever you want to call it, the image of Megi at the top of the page, captured by NASA's Terra satellite as it made landfall on northern Luzon Island, probably tells you everything you need to know about what Megi is and about its power to destroy lives and property.
It is a big, intense monster of a storm, packing sustained winds as it hit Luzon of at least 165 mph and pressure in its eye as low as 914 millibars.
"Megi is the strongest Category 5 tropical cyclone to make landfall in the world since Aug. 21 2007, when Hurricane Dean hit Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula with sustained winds of 175 mph and central pressure of 905 mb," observes tropical meteorologist Jeff Masters at Weather Underground.
A U.S. Hurricane Hunter team, in the western Pacific as part of an ongoing field research into tropical cyclones, flew into the eye of Megi and registered pressure of just 890 mb, noted Masters, which would rank the storm as the 16th strongest in recorded history.
IMAGE: NASA
Tags: Hurricanes, Meteorology
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